Confronting Change: An exploration of how teachers experience an externally mandated reform

Abstract

The purpose of this research has been to develop an understanding of teachers’ responses to a dramatic change in their working lives. While there is a significant body of research on the emotional impact of change in organisational life and a growing number of incidental findings related to large scale educational reform few studies have been specifically designed to investigate the emotional lives of teachers during a time of significant change. This narrative inquiry explores how twelve teachers perceived and interpreted their experience of an externally mandated reform namely, the closure of their schools to create an all age Academy. The central objectives have been to gain an insight into how they experienced this reform and to understand their perceptions of the outcomes.

Narrative inquiry was explicitly chosen to explore their individual responses to provide a counter discourse to the performative and rationalist culture within which these teachers worked and which prompted this specific reform. The twelve stories in this research corroborate many of the findings of other researchers and reflect an emotional diversity in their responses. The stories show that teachers who successfully managed their experience of change developed a level of emotional detachment from the wider context in which they were working and that this was either helped or hindered by a range of internal variables.